The organizers of LeanKanban Central Europe 2015 have posted an interview I did with Arne Roock, who, incidentally, will also be giving a presentation at the conference.

You can download the PDF from their site.

If you’ve never seen the Boyd material, I’m going to be presenting a fair amount of it, including about 100 pages of Patterns of Conflict and including slides from all the other briefings of the Discourse on Winning and Losing, during my tutorial.

The values that new Marines swear to uphold.

Yesterday, September 11, 2015, I had the privilege of watching 622 new Marines put on an impressive graduation ceremony. They started training on June 23rd and officially became Marines when they completed the Crucible about a week ago. This ceremony was their last official duty at Parris Island before leaving for the School of Infantry at Camp Geiger, North Carolina.

They all look so young.

[Note: the video starts with the flag raising ceremony, “Morning Colors,” at 0800 and then moves to the graduation parade itself, which began at 0900. The flag was raised only to half staff in memory of 9/11. The band is the MCRD Parris Island Band, which makes appearances all around the country. The dog’s name is “Legend.”]

The Guardian has a brief analysis centering on things like prestige (Apple products are expensive), ecosystem (Apple’s stuff works well together), and branding (you know what you’re going to get).

These are all true, but somehow, even taken together, they miss a key point: We’ve made Apple the world’s most valuable company because a whole lot of us really want to buy Apple products.  This may seem obvious, given the sales data, but think about it for a second. You have lots of choices for smartphones, for example, and a lot of them get great reviews in the tech press. But Apple continues to gain market share, even at their prices, while their sometimes technologically superior competitors lose.

Why?

I’m going to toss out a guess. Deep within Apple, Steve Jobs’ mantra is still alive and well: Insanely great! In other words, there are still enough people who influence product development and who understand the cheng / chi game. As you may recall, this ancient idea — the subject of Chapter 6 of the Sun Tzu text — involves using both the expected and the unexpected in combination to surprise and confuse an opponent and then exploit the situation before the opponent can figure it out. It’s the basis of Boyd’s concept of “operating inside the OODA loop.”

In business, though,  it should focus on the customer, not competitors, and becomes something like “it works great but it also delights users with …”  It works and it’s super cool! Yeah, I know that sometimes it doesn’t work that awfully great — I remember “MobileMe” and the first iteration of Apple Maps — but so far Apple has been a fast learner and fixes problems before they become fatal. Besides, as Boyd always insisted, you don’t have to be perfect, just better than your competition.

The result of expectation and delight working together is an emotional need, you just feel like buying their products is what you have to do. It’s just the right thing to do.

What’s really amazing is that Apple has kept corporate entropy at bay for so long. What usually happens is that slowly, over time, bean counters take over.  Risk taking subsides as profit taking dominates. Nokia could have had the first awesome smartphone, but they didn’t.  And putting arbitrary sales targets ahead of making the best products cost Toyota dearly earlier in the millennium.

We’re going to go into this a lot more at the Lean Kanban Conference in Munich in November, particularly in the workshop on the 18th.   Hope to see  you there.

More accurately, me in Bavaria talking about Boyd, strategy, and leadership.

If you happen to be anywhere near Munich in mid-November, I’ll be doing a keynote and presenting an all-day tutorial on Boyd’s concepts of leadership and strategy at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2015: http://www.lkce15.com/

Here’s the link to the tutorial: http://www.lkce15.com/tutorials/the-strategy-of-lean/ If you’ve never had the opportunity to hear Patterns of Conflict, this will be an opportunity to come up to speed. I’ll be discussing roughly 100 of its charts, plus charts from all the other sections of the Discourse on Winning and Losing.  We’ll also have case studies and opportunities for roundtable discussions.

Hope to see you there!

And we were expecting what?

There is strain of neocon thought that says that the Third World is filled with people yearning to establish tolerant, secular democracies.  This may well be true, but it’s the second half of the neocon proposition that gets us into trouble: If we just help them get rid of the “Big Men” (Thomas P.M. Barnett’s memorable description) who currently oppress them, the process will proceed more-or-less automatically.

The New Yorker has an update on our latest experiment, “ISIS Rises in Libya,” by Jon Lee Anderson.

Wary of appearing to be occupiers, the NATO powers that had helped liberate the country stood by as it fell apart.

Last week, David Cameron’s special envoy for Libya, Jonathan Powell, acknowledged that the West bore some responsibility for Libya’s collapse. “We made a mistake leaving Libya so soon after Qaddafi’s downfall,” he told me. “We thought they didn’t need any Paul Bremers”—a reference to the American official who controversially ran Iraq after the U.S. military invasion—“but in fact they did need help.”

Continue reading →

Mr. [William] McCants [director of the Project on U.S. Relations With the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution in Washington} said this was an underlying theme in his forthcoming book, “The ISIS Apocalypse,” to be published in September. “You’d like to say that treating people well and good governance go hand in hand,” he said, “but it’s not the case.” “ISIS Transforming Into Functioning State That Uses Terror as Tool,” Tim Arango, New York Times, 21 July 2015 (registration required)

This statement is almost correct, and well within what one might say but then like to edit later for clarity. A more accurate way to put it might be:  “You’d like to say that treating people well — as we would define “well” here in the West — and good governance go hand in hand, but it’s not the case.” Continue reading →

Dean has told me that his line,

Everyone expected a close match. During the first game Fischer blundered and lost. Fischer then went on to “take measures which allowed him to keep his own orientation intact, while taking active measures to destroy that of the opponent”.

contains an exact quote from Certain to Win, page 30.  I am most flattered.

However, he did mention that his middle initial is usually rendered as “M.” Personally, I thought “A.” flowed better.

Incidentally, if you haven’t downloaded The Turnaround from the Articles page, give yourself a middle-of-the-week present and do it now.

Boyd is often identified with the ability to operate more quickly than an opponent.  For example:

The ability to operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than an adversary enables one to fold adversary back inside himself so that he can neither appreciate nor keep-up with what’s going on. He will become disoriented or confused. Strategic Game, 44.

This is sometimes interpreted to mean that in a conflict, one should simply go berserk — run around like a chicken with its head cut off (I’ve never actually seen this, but you get the idea).  That might be a useful tactic, but there are other times when you might choose to operate at a much slower tempo.

Dean Lenane, CEO of Fischer Dynamics Europe in Wuppertal, Germany, and author of The Turnaround (available on our Articles page) explores this idea in the following article.

The Long Slow OODA Loop

Dean M. Lenane

We generally associate maneuver warfare and the application of the OODA loop as being part and parcel of a high tempo approach to winning in conflict situations. Indeed, part of the Boydian imperative for knowledge and training is preoccupied with creating the ability to do the right thing without having to think about it. We generally want to have ourselves so attuned to the environment that we can respond smarter and quicker than the opposition. This is one of the basic essences of the Colonel’s method. Continue reading →

Yes, because what you call it affects how you think about it.

Here’s just one example, from a recent article in The American Conservative:

During wartime who dares question almost any Pentagon cost “to defend America?”

From “12 Reasons America Doesn’t Win Its Wars,” by John Basil Utley.

Sun Tzu suggested, in the opening lines of The Art of War, that

War is a matter of vital importance to the state, the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin.

Griffith trans., p. 63.

It follows, then, that if what you’re looking at isn’t a matter of survival of the state, it isn’t war. Can you, with a straight face, claim that the United States is engaged with an existential enemy outside of its own boarders?  Continue reading →